I've been thinking about it, and there are three main issues at work in this catastrophy; the location of New Orleans, the large number of impoverished in N.O. and south Louisiana, and the lack of emergency preparedness, both on the state and national level.
Looking back on the United States' history, New Orleans (and Louisiana as a whole) played a large part in the developing of this country. The port of New Orleans has, and up until last week, still played a large part in the U.S. economy. I have a hard time grasping the rationality in continuing to develop such a large city in the location they did, but I guess things are the way they are. If Louisiana and the U.S. wanted to keep N.O. thriving, they needed to invest in the infrastructure necessary to do so. They obviously did not make that choice. The potential for this type of disaster has been known for much, much longer than Duhbya, even longer than Bush Sr. I remember in grade school (I'm 37 now) seeing pictures of what the southern Louisiana coastline would look like in the future if such a storm were to come through, or over time just due to the natural course of erosion. (The Mississippi River naturally needs to meander to keep depositing silt along the coastline, but the levees revent this.) Duhbya was the last to pass, so he's now catching the flack, and rightly so. And all the ones who study this type of thing get to say "I told you so." (The only thing I can say in W's defense is he's had more crap to deal with than any other lead has in a long, long time.)
Louisiana, historically, has not placed an emphasis on education. The first thing Blanco (our current gov.) did when she got in office was to drastically cut spending to higher education. Also, check the current salary range of our teachers. This, over time, has lead to a large work force of laborers, who tend to work the coastline where people can make their way fishing, working oil rigs, etc. There is also a tendency for the impoverished to not be willing to work as hard as the rest of the world. They do what they need to do to eek by, and that's it. And yes, there are always the exceptions to the rule, but by and large they chose not to better themselves. We can argue that they were never taught the choices they have, but this is a debate for a whole other thread. Bottom line is, they were dependent on the government to bail them out, and you see what happens when you rely on big government. I just don't understand why they want to continue to *give* more money to the poor, and continue this welfare mentality (and again I'm hijacking my own thread).
Follow these two conditions up with inadequate leadership and this is what we get. Blanco, nor the N.O. mayor, placed enough emphasis on evacuating before their 9 a.m. press conference Sunday morning when they declared the manditory evacuation. This was too little, too late. Sunday evening they were on the news telling everyone to take alternate routes because all of the major highways were gridlocked. Then, they're telling those that cannot evacuate to go to these certain shelters. Shelters that were WAY underprepared, due, I'm told, to more recent budget cuts to emergency preparedness (thanks again, Blanco). Then, on top of our own local government's ineptness, there is the large federal goverment that takes three acts of congress and an ammendment to the constitution to make the smallest decisions.
Bad on top of bad on top of bad, and we've created quite a pickle.
